Personally I always start with common sense. I have worked with many clients that want to reinvent the wheel when there is absolutely no need to do so.

You'll get the looks as if to say "are you even a designer tho?" because of keeping it simple but once they get their chance to explore the radical way they envisioned a solution it soon comes back to "we have to simplify this"

Once the basics are solved we can then add the bells and whistles.

(Thought I'd add that a lot of my product design is targeted at internal software used for business operations)

(Viewed on Desktop)

On the first load I completely lost your request access field. I think this was due to the amount of animation you have on the initial load. This goes for both the Light and Dark theme.

Maybe try moving the requested bar down a bit so the call to action has more space to be dominant and not lost amongst the animations.

Also not sure if you need the requested bar animated, it's nice don't get me wrong but I think the fact that you have two animations going at once confused me a little and I was looking all over the place at the start. If I had to pick I'd say keep the bar animation because it links to your primary objective, getting people to request access.

Personal preference but I think the Light theme was easier to ready and felt like the page had more breathing room.

Hope that helps